The present invention generally relates to digital image forming apparatus, and more particularly to a digital image forming apparatus that performs a character information cutting, a character recognition or a graphic or picture recognition, which may be applied to digital copying machines, facsimile machines, wordprocessors and the like.
A conventional digital copying machine generally has no capability of performing an image recognition, and it is difficult to easily remake characters and linear graphics which are manually written in an original to a desired form or style in which the characters and the linear graphics are neatly arranged. This capability of digital image forming apparatus allows a wavy line drawn by hand on an original to be automatically modified to a completely straight line or allows a skewed circle manually written thereon to be automatically changed to a perfect circle. Conventionally, an original image remaking method has been used to carry out these tasks using existing apparatus such as a keyboard of a wordprocessor or an optical Chinese character recognition unit (so-called kanji OCR) for inputting information to remake an image of the original to a desired form or style. However, it is difficult to produce a finely modified image of the original with such existing apparatus, and using the above described conventional method is quite time-consuming. The remaking method using the wordprocessor keyboard especially requires much time and labor for inputting information to modify the image of the original. And, because the existing optical Chinese character recognition unit can achieve only a small certainty factor of the optical character recognition, the resultant image by using the Chinese character recognition unit is often troublesome in an image correction procedure and is not enough to produce a finely remade image of the original.